CTV Has Room For Improvement in Ad Pods

Mike Baker, investor and strategic advisor

Differences in the way CTV and linear TV manage commercial breaks are driving a need for technical standards for advertising that will improve the consumer experience. The engineering of CTV apps and stream encoding are among the factors that need to be harmonized to avoid repeating ads in pods.

YouTube Drives Significant Share of CTV Viewership

Mike Fisher, vice president of advanced TV and audio at Essence

YouTube, the video-sharing platform owned by Google, is emerging as a viable alternative to other streamed programming as more households hook up their TVs to the internet. That growth has led advertisers to look for a combination of premium content and audiences within YouTube.

More Brands See CTV Opportunities on YouTube

David George, CEO of Pixability

The pandemic led people to spend more time at home while driving a significant shift in viewing habits. As YouTube’s viewership has grown, more brands are adopting the video-sharing platform as a bigger part of their strategies to reach consumers.

CTV Ads Help to Drive Purchase Intent

Grace Smith, senior digital marketing manager at Saucony

Saucony, the sportswear brand owned by Wolverine World Wide, reached new audiences with a CTV campaign that helped to drive higher purchase intent. About two-thirds (65%) of consumers who bought Saucony’s products after seeing its ads on Amazon Fire were first-time customers.

CTV Success on YouTube Takes Know-How

Tony Weisman, advisor and board member; former CMO of Dunkin’

“It’s no longer a question about whether or not you’re going to invest in YouTube,” Weisman said, “but are you going to do it smartly, or are you going to do it with somebody who can really make sure that that investment is wise? Or are you just going to take your chances? And I would not advise anyone to just take their chances.”

Brand Suitability More Nuanced Than Safety on YouTube

Matt Duffy, CMO of Pixability

While YouTube is mostly a brand-safe platform, advertisers still need to consider whether its content is also suitable for their campaigns. Pixability found in a survey that many advertisers rely on third-party vendors to help understand brand suitability.

Consumer Intent Emerges as Key CTV Audience Signal

Rob Norman, advisory board member for Pixability

“We’ve become familiar with the Amazon walled gardens and the Facebook walled gardens, but we’re about to become familiar with device-led walled gardens, operated by people like LG, Samsung, and Vizio,” Norman said. “The use of identifiers in the TV market is evolving at really quite a space. What I’m hoping people are going to do is to stand back and look at other forms of signal other than identifiers.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

Case in point – the ability to target ads in CTV also creates new management tasks around the traditional TV ad “pod”.

That is according to one seasoned video ad-tech exec. In this video interview with Beet.TV,  Mike Baker, who co-founded dataxu and then sold it to Roku last year, discusses the approaches that need to be taken.

The commercial break

Baker says differences in the way linear and connected TV manage commercial breaks sometimes leave CTV needing improvement.

“The ad pod is well-managed in linear TV environments (but), due to the way the CTV plumbing works … repetitive ads can sort of pour into the same ad pod,” he says.

He blames factors like app engineering, stream encoding, app makers’ decisions, broadcaster factors and splits on inventory often conflicting.

As a solution, he advocates a “standardized taxonomy” for ads, Ad-ID, being brought to CTV, “so we can have a better consumer experience”.

Beyond spots

It’s bigger than plumbing, however.

Baker hails work being done at companies like Hulu and Roku to go beyond the traditional interstitial commercial break experience, “with more creative integrations into the viewer experience”, and work from outfits like IRIS TV and Pixability which crunch YouTube videos to make descriptive signals that describe their inner content.

Baker joined the board of Pixability in March 2020 after his dataxu was sold to Roku for $150 million. The company aims to increase brand suitability for YouTube ad buyers – something Baker says is important since a growing proportion of YouTube viewing is now carried out on TV sets.

In fact, Nielsen Streaming Meter says, of the 25% of TV time spent with streaming video, 20% goes to YouTube, making it the second-most-watched digital video platform after Netflix.

Accordingly, YouTube’s CTV ad revenue is growing fast.

Behold, the contextual graph?

All of which makes the efficacy of YouTube ad sales all the more important.

Companies like Pixability and IRIS TV aim to turn video content into metadata signals, surfaced in buying platforms, that ad buyers can leverage or swerve. They are enabling the new wave of “contextual” video ad targeting.

“Companies like dataxu were innovators in creating a consumer data graph,” Baker says of his old firm.

“But I think it’s time for a context graph and not just for Google to create its federated learning of cohorts. Really, everybody should be working on how the creative fit of the advertising and the content go together.”

You are watching “Driving Reach and Results on Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Pixability. For more videos, please visit this page.

But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?

Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.

But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?

A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…

TV is the same – and different

Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…

Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:

“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.

“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”

But TV is fragmenting

Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.

Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”

Advertisers want ‘TV’, but like digital

From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…

Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights

“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.

“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”

Addressable TV hard to scale

The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…

Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:

“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.

“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.

“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”

But beware excess scale

But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”

Measurement needs metadata

Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…

Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:

“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.

“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

“What’s different about them is they come to the TV investment process with data of their own” typically consisting of e-commerce conversion data, CEO Baker says of direct-to-consumer marketers. Dataxu’s OneView identity and data management platform can “turn that into a TV plan,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“That’s one of the big trends in advanced TV in 2019 and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen our revenue go up forty times year over year from connected TV.”

Already comfortable with a data-driven marketing process, newer users of the company’s TouchPoint demand-side platform seek to leverage all of their online and mobile data in new channels.

“Many of them have seen things like Facebook or Google search sort of saturate as a play for conversions, and so they’re very interested in not only the branding aspects of TV but also the ability to drive return on investment for new customer acquisition.”

Nine years ago, long before the concept of advanced TV, demand-side platform TouchPoint was dataxu’s starting point. Along the way the company found that most marketers had a problem with connecting the dots between targeting and measurement on PC’s and mobile phones. OneView, which solves for this and can now factor in streaming devices and connected TV, “has really been the center point of our growth in TV and addressable TV,” Baker says.

Consumer device identity is a problem shared by the sell-side, as evidenced by dataxu’s involvement with media sellers like Sky in the U.K. “So on the sell-side, we’re increasingly working with some of the big media companies to help them on attribution and media planning that merges digital and linear data.”

In addition to direct-to-consumer brands, agencies with billings between $50 million and $100 million that never developed big TV teams, are bringing some of their clients into advanced TV. Baker predicts that some of the biggest agencies will be joining in as well.

“What’s been holding them back has been a little bit of uncertainty around who owns converged TV” within those agencies, Baker says.

As for a misconception that advanced TV cannot be done at scale, he adds, “I think at CES we’ll be talking a lot about the fact that you can and a lot of people are doing it today.”

Update: NBCU’s Yaccarino Issues Call To Action On Advertising Standards

On Jan. 7, NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino cited “privacy issues, data misuse, measurement chaos and brand safety neglect” at “major digital advertising platforms” while seeking industry unity for high business standards.

“For decades, audiences have loved premium content, and advertisers have trusted networks’ multiscreen advertising ecosystems,” Yaccarino said in an article published on the NBCU website. “That’s why the premium media industry has refused to compromise its core values for how that content is created and distributed, even as we disrupt legacy mindsets and reinvent how we operate.”

Among other benefits, lowering barriers to entry for marketers to engage in TV advertising has attracted direct-to-consumer brands, Yaccarino noted.

“Already what had been an exclusive space for established companies is now welcoming a wave of entrepreneurs whose disruptive brands had long been at a disadvantage against larger incumbents. But here’s the best part: The marketplace is opening up without any compromises on consumers’ or brands’ safety.”

She called for all media publishers, agencies and platforms “to raise standards to let a safer, smarter, more accessible advertising ecosystem take flight.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

“While you can’t do all that programmatically in terms of execution, what you can do is look at that analytically in terms of understanding reach and frequency of, like, a special precision audience across these different ways of watching TV,” Baker says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.

A big plus has been the addition to the mix of quality data from automatic content recognition technology, which Baker calls “a game changer.” Adding that data to a device graph containing digital data enables advertisers and agencies “to start to look at households, and even people within the household, in a holistic, sort of normalized basis.”

The impetus for some agencies to de-silo their approach to media planning and execution has been their clients’ push to amass greater amounts of first-party customer data and invest in data-management platforms, according to Baker.

“Obviously, these companies have done a great job of selling the vision of the importance of first party data,” he says. “But then it’s sort of like, ‘Hey I need to use this in more places because it’s expensive to implement these programs and collect data.’ So one of the places would be media investment.”

One example could be “I have a pile of cookies and now I need to use this. Please use this identity information for TV planning, buying and even inflight optimization and measurement.”

This is one reason why agencies have become customers of dataxu’s OneView identity solution, “to help them solve the problem of how do you translate digital device data coming out of a DMP into a world where you’re buying and measuring TV,” says Baker.

Many direct-to-consumer brands that started life by specializing in analyzing the meaning of abandoned shopping carts and relying heavily on platforms like Facebook and Google now want to use their CRM files for TV. They want to execute on TV “in the same incrementality and return on ad spend against a very specific set of consumers. The problem is the same. How to translate digital logic and data into shared device or concept of TV household versus just a person.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

Hearst’s TV footprint spans 39 states where the company is now selling connected TV in conjunction with the same linear audiences for local TV, the Co-Founder, President and CEO of dataxu explains in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018.

“So it’s quite an innovative offering and because it’s Hearst, of course it features premium content on connected TV. And all that’s being powered by dataxu’s technology,” Baker says. “We’ve been really struck by how quickly it’s growing. Bear in mind, these are local, traditional, tier three advertisers” like movie theatres and car dealerships, the “bread and butter of local TV advertising. It’s been tremendous to see the interest in connected TV and these digital audiences, I think for good reason.”

Bringing together local linear and digital via TotalTV makes it possible to re-aggregate hard-to-reach viewers like young males who are “very hard to reach at all or with frequency on linear TV,” Baker adds.

Local TV represents roughly $25 billion of the $70 billion TV advertising industry, according to Baker, “and it has a completely different market structure. There’s targeting of course in the DMA’s and even below the DMA level, which is more possible with some of the new digital technologies like connected TV.

“So the opportunity is really to take local, geographic targeting combined with some of the more traditional ratings demography and put them together in an automated, high-efficiency, easy to operate sales machine. Groups like Hearst have hundreds of TV sellers, so you have to forecast and deliver and account for and report across many thousands of campaigns,” says Baker.

By most definitions, that is a recession.

But Mike Baker thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. The CEO of ad-tech firm dataxu thinks digital and linear TV can combine to make something greater than the sum of their parts.

“I was a little-bit surprised how people were a little bit off on linear TV,” Baker said, describing the chat at our recent Beet Retreat industry event. “There was a lot of consternation about the viewership, about the ad effectiveness and whatnot.

“We’re definitely feeling some of the frustration, I think, in the middle of the upfront, with some of the viewership and the ad fatigue, if you like, on linear TV.”

But linear TV doesn’t have to stay linear, and ad buys don’t have to be so one-dimensional. These days, partners like dataXu are helping broadcast operators offer advertisers the best of both worlds.

“We have a product called One View, which we’ve used for the connected TV to take digital audiences and translate them into TV,” Baker adds.

“Now what we’re doing is really looking analytically at the linear TV to explain to linear TV buyers how connected TV can increment the reach.”

This interview was conducted by Matt Prohaska.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The digital migration is not complete until it disappears,” says Baker, chief of DataXu, an ad-tech vendor bringing data science to the planning of ads on digital media and, increasingly in video and TV.

“What I mean by that is, once the devices and data are connected up, then it’s all just marketing and advertising again; the silos disappear. The culmination of that is the disappearance of TV in to this broader movement.”

DataXu began in 2009, at the cusp of the programmatic boom, starting by empowering advertisers’ digital display. Since then, it has branched out in to mobile and, latterly, video and TV, culminating this year in a $10 million investment from UK pay TV platform leader Sky.

Baker is using math to dream up more efficiency for advertisers.

“Could I frequency-cap against a desired audience to show a number of advertisements in a month over all devices, either at the person level or the household level, or the market level?,” he wonders.

“Can we work towards a sentiment shift for a product… by a/b testing users, By looking at their internet activity post-exposure to TV?”

This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.